‘Needle’ Used to Discover Issues Within iOS Applications

By MWR,
5 October 2016

MWR InfoSecurity will be demonstrating Needle – its open source modular framework for conducting security assessments of iOS applications

MWR's Marco Lancini will be presenting at OWASP’s 13th Annual AppSecUSA Security Conference in Washington on Friday October 14th and Black Hat Europe Arsenal in London, on Thursday November 3rd. The session will include the tool's architecture, capabilities and roadmap as well as demonstrate how Needle can be used to find vulnerabilities in iOS applications from both a black-box and white-box perspective (if source code is provided).

“Assessing the security of an iOS application typically requires a plethora of tools, each developed for a specific need and all with different modes of operation and syntax. The Android ecosystem has tools like ‘drozer’ that have solved this problem and aim to be a ‘one stop shop’ for the majority of use cases, however iOS did not have an equivalent. Needle is an open source modular framework which aims to streamline the entire process of conducting security assessments of iOS applications, and acts as a central point from which to do so. Given its modular approach, Needle is easily extensible and new modules can be added in the form of python scripts.”

Needle is intended to be useful not only for security professionals, but also for developers looking to secure their code. A few examples of testing areas covered by Needle include: data storage, inter-process communication, network communications, static code analysis, hooking and binary protections. The only requirement in order to run Needle effectively is a jailbroken device. The tool's architecture, capabilities and roadmap will be described.

Marco will also be using Needle as part of his two-day workshop at DeepSec in Vienna. The exercise-driven training course uses detailed tutorials to guide attendees through all the steps necessary to exploit a real iOS application, and in the process, provide an understanding of the modern attacker's mind-set and capabilities. Anyone interested can register to attend here: https://www.mwrinfosecurity.com/events/deepsec-2016/

MWR InfoSecurity provide specialist advice and solutions in all areas of cyber security, from professional and managed services, through to developing commercial and open source security tools. More about MWR.